1. Field of the Invention
This invention is directed to a method of submitting the location of contraband, and more particularly, a method of submitting and updating of the location of contraband in a vehicle using a cloud-based server or database.
2. Description of the Related Art
Law enforcement officers are often challenged with criminals attempting to outsmart officers by routinely hiding drugs, weapons, money and various forms of contraband within vehicles. The officer's challenge is to stay a step ahead of the criminals and use the information they have obtained in the field to properly search vehicles and find illegal items hidden by criminals.
Officers often rely on their own experience in determining the location of contraband within a car, yet the criminals are much more attune to the intricacies of their own car, and may know of particularly good hiding places within their specific vehicle. A law enforcement officer may only know generally the places where criminals usually hide contraband, but not know every possible hiding place in a specific car. This lack of specific vehicle knowledge leads to an advantage for the criminal who wishes to hide contraband in his or her own car.
A pool of knowledge of contraband hiding places with a vehicle would be a great advantage to law enforcement. Pooled knowledge methods have previously been described, such as U.S. Pat. No. 7,193,532 to Goldstein. Goldstein describes a system and method where an officer can view information on a compact disc (CD) that contains information concerning the location in the vehicle of potential hiding places, a method of accessing the hiding places, and tools required to access each hiding place. Officers can contact other officers to inform them of any new hiding places that the officer has found. Disadvantageously, updating information on local storage systems may erase useful data already stored, and may be difficult to integrate new data into old data. Therefore, methods that allow easy and reliable updating of contraband locations are still highly desired.